Marion and The Children is a very mild nod to a film I first saw when I was about six, I think, and which turned up on TV at regular intervals right up until the dawn of multi-channels when old films were shifted to ‘Classic’ stations. It was The Inn of The Sixth Happiness, a romanticised version of the life of missionary Gladys Aylward, particularly the part of her life where she almost single-handedly brought fifty-odd children from an orphanage in Japanese invaded China to a safe evacuation point by the Yangtze river.

There is an echo of that epic journey in Marion’s trek through the huge space station with the children of the delegates. When they were dodging behind the shuttles to avoid the guards I was thinking of a scene in the aforementioned film when the children were in a forest with the Japanese soldiers on their trail.

Sliding down the laundry chute to escape from the dormitory doesn’t relate to any cultural reference at all. It ISN’T anything to do with the live action 101 Dalmations, where the puppies do something similar. I wasn’t thinking of that, at all. It just seemed a really good way to get out of the room.

As with the previous story, the different species among the children are important. The two Tiboran children who have telepathic communication between each other prove their worth making sure the laundry chute is safe. Dree, the bright yellow laundry maid at the bottom of the chute is a slight not to Rufello, the plumber on Platform One in the Doctor Who episode End of the World. Some kind of lesser race doing the ancillary work seems to be the norm on space stations.

I wanted to point out the differences in the species using the stairs as an obstacle approached by them in different ways. The thin boy whose planet didn’t have stairs, and the Genullan whose gills didn’t work so well when climbing, had trouble here. The boy with feathery wings just had to take his shirt off. incidentally, his species will come up again in the future.

Having reached the safety of the TARDIS, of course, it was all over bar the shouting. Marion couldn’t go anywhere, but she and the children were safe. If this was a longer story, there might have been more obstacles, but I try to keep the Marion and Kristoph tales to less than 2,500 words. After all, I am also writing a full length story of at least 6,000 words per week. My undergraduate thesis was 15,000 words and took a month to write and another two months to edit and redraft. I’m essentially writing a thesis every fortnight. Keeping the Marion and Kristoph stories short and sweet is essential to my sanity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inn_of_the_Sixth_Happiness